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Djibouti's former colonizer France has had a permanent military presence in Djibouti since the country's 1977 independence...which Djibouti kept as a tool to fend off possible territorial threats during the cold war from Ethiopia and Somalia.
In July 2024, Presidents Macron and Guelleh signed a renewal of the 🇩🇯 🇫🇷 military pact that would keep the 1,500 French soldiers in the country, with Djibouti pocketing a cool 85M euros annually.
You may recall the other day, I put up this brief thread, highlighting how rising anti-French sentiments across western Africa in recent years...let to the withdrawals of French troops from 6 African states, and huge strategic and geopolitical losses of influence.
Facing rejection in the West Africa, France is working overtime to consolidate its presence in East Africa.
Including in the country that hosts the last French army base in Africa: you guessed it, Djibouti.
https://dair-community.social/@ZekuZelalem/115274769314108860
If you're still with me...you must be wondering what the heck the role of France is in all this.
France is not used as clickbait in this thread, and I'll address Paris and its possible complicity in the bloodshed from hereon out.
An Ethiopian source tells me that in response to the backlash that followed Ethiopian local media reports...Ethiopian officials ordered Djiboutian drones to stop crossing the border, and they did.
However, Ethiopia did not want news of its allowing a neighbouring country to massacre its civilians on its soil for the second time in five years (link to reports of Eritrean war crimes in Tigray) so it went ahead with the coverup, and total silence.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/03/05/ethiopia-eritrean-forces-massacre-tigray-civilians
While the exact terms of what 🇩🇯 and 🇪🇹 agreed to in December remains up for speculation...what is known..is that weeks later, Djiboutian drones began to strike targets in Ethiopia.
A first strike in December missed its target. A second killed two pastoralists. The last one...was the Siyaru massacre of 30/1/25.
This is the explanation that Djiboutian sources have for what was agreed to:
Djibouti called the meeting, requesting permission from Ethiopia to use its airspace to attack Djiboutian FRUD rebels known to operate across the porous border. Ethiopia, too preoccupied with internal wars to go after them, agreed.
While the FRUD rebellion remains a lowscale insurgency, in 2022, they did ambush a Djiboutian army base, killing 7 soldiers. Al Jazeera coverage of that attack.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/10/8/djibouti-says-seven-soldiers-killed-in-armed-group-attack
So the whole chain of events actually started in December 2024.
Ethiopian and Djiboutian intelligence officials met in the Ethiopian capital for talks. Afterwards, they signed an opaque agreement to tackle "cross-border anti-peace activities."
This Ethiopian state media report didn't provide many details, about what those activities were, and how they would be jointly tackled. Vague, as is typical for state announcements from this part of the world.
Among the unanswered questions...why would Ethiopia be strangely silent about a drone massacre in its territory by a neighbouring country, with a far smaller army that poses no realistic threat to Ethiopia?
Why was Djibouti so eager to cover it up that its Presidential advisor Alexis Mohamed claimed (in this now deleted social media posts) that reports of an atrocity in Ethiopia were "pure disinformation orchestrated by elements hostile to Djibouti"?
Why all hush hush?
Conclusion: consistent testimony + openly sourced evidence = a triple tap strike targeting funeral goers that could not be the result of shrapnel.
It took place on Ethiopian soil. There's no way blowback caused by a MAM-L from a target in Djibouti could reach all the way out to the location identified.
What Djibouti claimed was a domestic anti-rebel operation...was actually a possible war crime in a neighbouring country.
Questions remain though.
Djibouti never publicly acknowledged its purchase of drones. But in 2022, during 45th independence day celebrations, it held a military parade for President Ismail Omar Guelleh...that was broadcast live by Djiboutian state media. The screenshot is from that broadcast.
From 1:15:20 (link below)...you can see Djibouti's fleet of Bayraktar TB2 drones, armed with Roketsan warheads. You can even read the Roketsan logo on the bomb. Consistent with what was found at Siyaru.
https://youtu.be/ifnWPKpvnWU
The fact that this was a laser guided MAM-L warhead, suggests that the group of people were intentionally attacked.
With such a small blast radius, you cannot claim that this was the result of shrapnel or debris from a separate and legitimate target away from the gathering. Multiple precision strikes on the same sizeable gathering over the course of three hours (with women and children), with such a precise weapon?
Cold blooded, premeditated slaughter.
It's relevant, because all of the eyewitnesses and survivors we spoke to confirmed that the strike hit a small gathering of residents attending a funeral for a local elder. Then, an hour later, another strike hit people who had rushed to assist the injured. A third strike followed, meaning it was a "triple tap" attack designed to inflict maximum casualties. Eight people died, four or five others were injured.
I remember this Turkish warhead, as the same one was used during an October 2022 drone massacre in Oromia I also investigated. I learned from another expert then that it has a blast radius of about 15 meters, and will thus only kill groups of people if they are all near each other, which was the case with the strike we looked at that hit a crowd gathered at a school in October 2022.
The 2022 probe. Why is this relevant?
https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/evidence-of-drone-strikes-against-civilian-areas-in-ethiopia/
I obtained these exclusive images, showing remnants of the projectiles fired at Siyaru during the night of 30/1/25.
They looked familiar. But I contacted an expert. Trevor Ball, a former US army explosives expert now affiliated with Bellingcat, confirmed that this was a Turkish MAM-L laser guided bomb, manufactured by the Ankara based Roketsan company. It's a drone that is typically fitted with the Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drone, manufactured by Baykar, another Turkish state enterprise.
The area in the footage, is at these coordinates:
11°58'56.05"N 42° 3'8.36"E.
Eyewitnesses all placed the specific drone impact zone somewhere behind the men in the vicinity of this place. The entire area is within Siyaru, and approximately 1.2- 2km away from Ethiopia's border with Djibouti. The further away from the camera one goes...the deeper into Ethiopia one goes.
For further perspective...this location is actually 7.2-8km away from Addorta, where Djibouti claims it took place.
Peakvisor helped identify the mountains, and eventually the location where the footage was captured. The peak encircled in orange, appears not far from where the men were standing. It is actually the 4000ft+ tall Mount Sasakle peak, 8km away in Djibouti. But it's visible in Ethiopia.
After finding the location, using satellite imagery, one could find a match for the protective hut structures and even the road the men in the footage were seen walking along.
From here, it was manual labour, including following pathways through the mountains on Google Earth, and canvassing mountains for chains of peaks that resemble those that we uncovered by stitching screenshots on Microsoft Paint together.
The Peakvisor app (https://peakvisor.com/) is an incredible topography tool for identifying peaks and mountain ridges. The app helped me land a consisten match...sometime in June.
I stitched together a bunch of screenshots from the 26 second video I uploaded earlier showing locals collecting a body. As the cameraman panned back and forth, the stitched image revealed the layout of the larger area...the foot of mountains, a road, a few Oguhs and a sheet metal roof structure. While these structures are ubiquitous here...finding one in front of the exact mountain ridge pattern seen here, would almost certainly identify this location.
Eventually...I managed to identify a number of mountains..including the impressive Mount Mousa Ali, which unites the borders of three countries here: 12°28'07.1"N 42°24'15.5"E.
From there, eyewitnesses used their memory and knowledge of the area to guide me on a map southwards to Siyaru...and specific areas identified by numbers of huts, nomad tents and sheet metal structures.
With this critical guidance...I narrowed down the area with the potential massacre location.
Local expertise helps though. While there are no major monuments, roads, buildings or distinguishable structures that one could use to canvass the region via satellite imagery...speaking with Afar locals helped me identify prominent mountain peaks, and also taught me about what they use to navigate the area: soil colour among other things.
For months, I had wondered what these wierd circular shapes in the ground were. They are called "Oguh" I'm told, and serve to protect goats from hyenas.